Friday, July 8, 2016

US can expand exports without TPP-US already exports more to non-FTA countries. So-called trade deals have been hijacked by special interests, harm Americans, and must be replaced, including their 'tribunals' and parts unrelated to trade. TPP is no 'new model' but is NAFTA plus, expanding its worst terms. Obama hopes to pass TPP in lame duck with fired and retiring representatives-Lori Wallach

Indeed, U.S. export growth to countries that are not Free Trade
Agreement (FTA) partners has exceeded U.S. export growth to FTA partners
by 29 percent over the past decade. By the end of 2015, the aggregate U.S. trade deficit with FTA partners had increased by 418 percentsince
the FTAs were implemented while that with all non-FTA countries had
decreased by 6 percent.

How can that
be? For the same reason polls repeatedly show that most Americans are
for trade and against our trade agreements: America’s trade policy and
trade agreements have been hijacked by special interests.

Indeed, the
TPP’s strongest opponents are not against trade and do know what is in
such agreements. That is precisely why they oppose them.

The pro-free-trade Cato Institute calls these foreign
investor protections, found in pacts since the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), a subsidy for offshoring. The terms significantly
reduce risks and costs for firms that relocate.

Or consider
that our “free trade” agreements impose protectionist intellectual
property monopolies. Big PhRMA got terms that require every signatory
country to extend the periods during which pharmaceutical firms can
avoid generic competition and thus charge obscene medicine prices. The
pacts also include terms extending copyright protections and limits on
Internet freedom that undermine access to knowledge and stifle
innovation. ...........

The pacts also
provide new tools for transnational investors to attack the
environmental and health policies on which we all rely to keep our
families safe. Major oil and gas firms have been among the most frequent
users of these infamous investor-state dispute settlement provisions.
They empower individual foreign corporations and investors to drag the
U.S. government in front of foreign arbitration tribunals to demand
compensation from taxpayers when the investor believes that policies -
applying equally to domestic and foreign firms enacted by Congress and
approved by our courts - violate their new trade pact investor rights...........

Agribusiness
interests got terms that require us to import food that does not meet
U.S. safety standards. The GEs, GMs and other manufacturing firms that
offshored production pushed rules that forbid us to apply “Buy American”
procurement policies. That lets them still benefit from U.S. government
procurement contracts after they move production to sweatshops abroad.
Yes, our trade pacts also offshore our tax dollars rather than
harnessing government purchasing power to create jobs and spur
innovation here....

Every effort at common sense reform has been beaten back - both in the agreements and in U.S. policy. ....

So we have tax
policies that reward job offshoring and provide impunity for ‘American’
firms that invert their corporate structure to tax havens but no rules
to stop other countries from cheating on trade by lowering the value of
their currency. Currency devaluations subsidize their exports to us -
wiping out American jobs, firms and farmers - and make our exports too
expensive to sell in the currency-manipulating countries.......

There are no
limits on trade with countries complicit in horrific human rights
abuses. But it would violate the trade rules if we cut off trade with a
country after a coup against a democratic government. ..........

In sum, our
trade policies reflect the goals of certain privileged interests to the
detriment of promoting the broad public interest..........

Having lived
with the damaging results over the past decades, it should be no
surprise that many Americans are against these corrupt special interest
trade policies. ........

And now we have
presidential candidates from both parties revealing the truth: There is
nothing inevitable about the damage, but rather the rules have been
rigged against us. ............

We have
suffered the net loss of nearly 5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs and
more than 57,000 factories, and seen millions of higher-wage service
sector jobs offshored.

Americans face
flat median wages despite significant productivity gains as those losing
jobs to bad trade polices join the glut of Americans competing for
non-offshorable service sector jobs. This has been a major contributor
to the worst U.S. income inequality in the last century. ...........

The volume of
U.S. food exports has stagnated while U.S. food imports have more than
doubled in the past 20 years of NAFTA-style deals. The result: family
farmers wiped out and all our families flooded with unsafe imported
food.

............

And this is not
just a NAFTA problem. The 2012-implemented Korea FTA included the
higher labor and environmental standards congressional Democrats forced
into George W. Bush’s last trade pacts. But still the U.S. trade deficit
with Korea grew over 90 percent in the first three years it was in
effect. That equates to the loss of 90,000 American jobs, counting
imports and exports in the formula the administration used to predict
job gains from the pact.

We can do better and we must. ............

Trade agreements and policies are how we can write rules for the global economy. And the United
States is uniquely able to set trade policies that others have to
follow. That leverage is the only upsideto having the largest trade
deficit in history.........

China, Vietnam,
Mexico, Japan and other nations are deeply reliant on being able to
sell things here. That means these governments need to come to agreement
with us on terms of trade or risk economic disruptions that could
undermine their own political viability. ............

But to date,
this leverage has been squandered to obtain special protections for Big
PhRMA and U.S. firms seeking to invest abroad rather than to secure
terms that work for all of us. We desperately need a new American trade policy.

...........

To achieve that, first, we must do no further harm. As Paul Krugman put it in a recent New York Times column, we need “a standstill on further deals, or at least a presumption that proposed deals are guilty unless proved innocent.”

We must not enact any more-of-the-same, job-killing, race-to-the-bottom agreements.

Imagine the
fury if the public knew that the Obama administration also is close to a
deal with China after years of closed-door negotiations. That China
Bilateral Investment Agreement would provide special protections for
U.S. corporations that offshore investment to China and give Chinese
firms new rights to buy up American manufacturing companies, energy and
communications firms, and land. .........

This includes
enforceable disciplines against currency cheating; removing offshoring
incentives, bans on Buy American preferences, patent extensions and the
investor-state tribunal system in trade pacts; conditioning access to
the U.S. market on countries meeting international labor, environmental
and human rights standards; eliminating existing U.S. tax credits,
subsidies such as Export-Import bank loans, and government contracts for
firms that ship jobs overseas; enacting domestic tax and procurement
policies that reward firms producing here; expanding Buy American
procurement preferences; eliminating the corporate benefits for
companies that relocate their corporate headquarters overseas to take
advantage of a tax loophole and so forth. .............

Third, before
we consider negotiating any new agreements, we must create a new model
that ensures any future pacts create jobs here and raise wages. ..........

The TPP’s
boosters cynically claim that the TPP is the new model. In fact, the TPP
includes word-for-word much of the old NAFTA-style language. Worse, it
actually expands on some of NAFTA’s most damaging terms, such as the
foreign investor privileges that promote job offshoring. ...........

The TPP rolls
back the initial reforms to trade-pact environmental and medicine patent
rules that congressional Democrats forced Bush to include in his last
trade deals. It would double U.S. liability under the investor-state
dispute settlement regime by empowering an additional 9,200 Japanese and
Australian firms to attack our laws in foreign arbitration tribunals."...

"Take the case ofCorn Products International (CPI). The transnational filed a NAFTA claim
against the Mexican government in 2003,claiming a loss to its business due to a taxlevied on high fructose corn syrup in beverages. Mexico’s
reason for imposing the tax was to save a sugarcane industry that
provided jobs for thousands of citizens and played a crucial economic
role in many regions. The government was also frustrated by its failure
under NAFTA to access the highly protected U.S. sugar market.

A 2008 NAFTA tribunal ruled that Mexico had to pay $58.4 million to CPI. The government paid up
on January 25, 2011. CPI posted $3.7 billion dollars in net sales the
year of the decision. The fine paid by the Mexican government could have
provided a year’s worth of the basic food basket to more than 50,000
poor families.CPI’s wholly owned subsidiary Arancia Corn Products is among the most
powerful food transnationals operating in the country, along with
Maseca/Archers Daniel Midland and Cargill. Large agribusiness companies
allegedly played a key role in the 2007 tortilla crisis
by hoarding harvest as the international price went up, artificially
drying up the national market and selling at nearly double the price
they paid for the harvest. That crisis brought tens of thousands of poor Mexicans out into the streets to protest a 50 percent rise in the price of tortillas.

10/20/2011,"NAFTA Is Starving Mexico,"Laura Carlsen, Foreign Policy in Focus. "Free trade has starved Mexico and stuffed transnational corporations."(The US political class has set it up so that every negative event in Mexico turns the spotlight on greedy, racist Americans who should once and for all forget the outdated notion of a US southern border and accept their status as global slaves)].

(continuing): "(While billions have been paid to foreign investors under this regime,
so far we have dodged the bullet because past U.S. pacts have been with
developing nations with few investors here.) .........

The TPP
includes notorious human rights violators like Brunei, which recently
implemented sharia-based laws for the stoning-to-death of gays and unwed
mothers, and Malaysia whose modern day slavery has made it among the
worst nations for human trafficking.

...........

What would a
good trade agreement look like? In 2009, Congress’ leading fair-trade
champions worked with economists, trade experts, businesses and
environmental, labor, consumer, faith and family-farm organizations to
develop that alternative. They hoped it would shape the approach taken
by the new incoming Obama administration..........

That is not how history played out, and thus we have the TPP--NAFTA on steroids................

But the 2009 Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment (TRADE) Act
provides a good blueprint for trade pacts that could benefit more
Americans. The legislation set forth what must and must not be included
in future pacts - basically eliminatingthe special interest non-trade
riders that now comprise the majority of our Trojan horse agreementsand
adding the rules to make actual trade terms more fair. ..........

It also
included criteria for what countries would be appropriate U.S. trade
agreement partners - those that offer American exporters opportunities
and where strong labor, environmental and human rights standards exist
in practice, not just on paper.

Unless and
until we enact a trade policy that can harvest the benefits of expanding
our exports to create well-paying American jobs and prosperity for
American farmers while growing jobs at home, raising wages and promoting
democracy, human rights and a healthy environment,the trade fury we
are now witnessing will only grow."